


Secret

by wishonadarkstar



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-14 00:23:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16902561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishonadarkstar/pseuds/wishonadarkstar
Summary: “I’ll tell you a secret,” he whispered.“I know all your secrets, you fool,” Hux replied.





	Secret

**Author's Note:**

  * For [claquesous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/claquesous/gifts).



Kylo Ren was a wretched creature.

Hux knew he was not the only person who thought so, staring down at him kneeling in the blood-red salt of this forsaken world, because the men in the command shuttle with him shifted slightly, an unasked question in their restlessness.

“No,” Hux said aloud, staring down at Kylo Ren, by turns disgusted by his poor showing and terrified by the implication. “If even he can’t defeat that-- that, then without him we have no chance at all.”

“It’s just one man,” someone muttered. Hux made a point of not looking to see who it was. Mutterings, even treasonous mutterings, couldn’t be punished if he didn’t know who was muttering.

“Perhaps,” he said. “But it was just one girl on the Supremacy as well, and we have altogether too much damage to show for it.”

It was pragmatic, and Hux had been raised to be pragmatic in his grasping for power. “If he wishes to lay claim to the title of Supreme Leader, we will let him. If we have any hope against just one man, or just one girl, then we let him.”

Someone coughed, and Hux fixed his attention back on the figure of Kylo Ren, a broken little boy who had somehow managed to claim everything Hux had been angling for his entire life just by a quirk of the universe, and watched him force himself to his feet and clip the deadly, archaic saber to his belt.

Just one man, and Hux, unfortunately, needed him.

***

Everything had been organized nearly to Hux’s satisfaction, and they were on the only ship he could have possibly claimed as the First Order’s flag ship, ferrying survivors back into a position that could firmly be called their territory, without any pesky remnants of the New Republic to argue over things, half their fleet limping on badly damaged hyper engines and the other half at two and three times their capacity.

Kylo Ren was in the main part of the cabin that Hux had co-opted from the ship’s captain, kneeling in front of what might have been an altar, had they had the resources for such a frivolous thing.

“Do you want me dead so badly,” Kylo asked quietly from where he was kneeling, eyes still shut when Hux glanced up.

Hux sighed and shoved away the datapad that he’d been reading, another summary of what they had lost, of what they still had.

“I don’t want you dead, Lord Ren,” Hux said. He’d very rarely bothered to call the man by his proper title when that had been his proper title, but it was the best compromise he’d been able to come up with between what he wished he could call Kylo and what Kylo wished to be called.

It grated, slightly, but it was a small annoyance in the scheme of things.

“Don’t you?”

This time Kylo had tilted his head back and was staring at Hux, something deliberate and vulnerable in his eyes.

“What’s gotten into you?” Hux snapped, shoving back from the captain’s too-small desk and standing up. Kylo Ren twisted slightly so he could keep eye contact, but didn’t otherwise move.

Not that it truly mattered: even if Kylo Ren could not destroy the strongest man in the galaxy, he could easily kill Hux with merely a thought.

“I want a galaxy at peace,” Hux said, staring down at him. “I want to see the First Order in ascendancy. I want a great many things, and very few of them can I achieve with your death.”

“Rey wants me dead,” Kylo said, apropos, as far as Hux could tell, of nothing.

Rey?

Hux stared at him, then realized: “That dirty little scavenger girl? The one you found on Takodana?”

The one, he thought quietly, who killed the Supreme Leader and didn’t bother to waste effort on making sure you were dead too?

“Her,” Kylo confirmed. “Yes. She reached out to me, she wanted me to know so. She said that everyone who has ever met me would rather I were dead.”

“Well,” Hux said. “You can certainly trust some uneducated scavenger rat from a desert planet who accidentally got caught up in the Resistance to know the mind of the general of your fleet.”

His voice came out acid and raw, and Kylo didn’t grin at him, that lopsided, half-feral grin that he’d levered up at Hux on more than one occasion. Instead, he shut his eyes again and straightened his posture, his focus settling, almost tangibly, somewhere that was other.

Not even a comment on Hux’s apparent promotion, though it wasn’t so surprising, considering how many had been lost with the Supremacy.

Fewer than could have been, but certainly more than Hux should have liked to lose, even if he’d been able to angle for nearly the promotion he would have liked out of it.

He waited, but Kylo Ren’s attention didn’t waver away from whatever mystic secret he was contemplating, as it often had in the past.

Sighing, he went back to the desk, to the chair that had been designed with another man’s ergonomics in mind, and the datapad that detailed how very much they had, in fact, lost.

It was well past the time the lieutenant from the mess had brought them their tray for dinner, past the time that Hux had given up on trying to run an entire military from a half-crippled ship limping through hyper, when Kylo finally stretched and stood up.

He stared at the tray, his lips curled back, his gaze dark and unreadable.

“Not to your taste, then, Supreme Leader?” Hux demanded. It came out bitter and sarcastic, the way he had managed not to say Lord Ren earlier, and he quietly lamented his own stupidity.

Kylo said nothing about his tone, however, and the dark lightning he’d known so intimately from Snoke didn’t lash up out of nowhere to make his nerve endings scream.

His breath didn’t stop in his throat to remind him that his life was only the sufferance of another.

“Perhaps…”

Hux waited, a stylus twirling between his fingers, for Kylo to say something, anything of value at all, and when the silence grew almost chill from anticipation, he cleared his throat.

“If you’re going to suggest something else equally idiotic from the lips of some uncouth girl who isn’t even here--”

Kylo surged around the desk and pinned Hux in place first with the Force and then with one trembling fist in the collar of Hux’s shirt.

He waited for a second, for the burst of temper to escalate.

When nothing happened, Hux reached up with one hand and carefully uncurled Kylo’s fist from his clothing, then twined their fingers together.

“Really?” Hux asked after another moment, his pulse thudding harder than it really ought to. Kylo had never managed to hurt him nearly as successfully as Snoke had, and this was hardly an exception to that rule.

“You don’t want me dead,” Kylo confirmed, and Hux sighed.

“I don’t want you running my empire into the ground before it’s had a chance to exist, but your death isn’t the solution to my problems you seem to think it might be. Besides, when have I ever given you any indication that if I wanted you dead, I’d let you maunder on about it at length within my hearing without doing something to facilitate the process?” 

“I don’t think...”

“Well, that much has always been quite clear to me, Kylo Ren.”

Hux’s crisp retort had the other man frozen, his hand still carefully clasped in Hux’s, his posture more hovering than looming, even if he was the one standing over Hux like a madman.

“Really,” Hux said quietly, more to himself than to Kylo. “Come now, you’re dwelling on entirely the wrong things after that little… setback of ours.”

“Really.” The word was a flat echo of Hux’s, but it carried far less meaning.

Hux squeezed Kylo’s hand, then used it to lever himself out of the chair.

“That chair is too small for you,” Kylo noticed, his eyes hard and flinty, like the chair had given him personal insult just by being small and uncomfortable.

“You’re not the one who had to sit in it all day,” Hux snapped, and Kylo glanced back at him, then at the chair.

“You’re the General of the Fleet now,” Kylo said, and Hux sort of despised him when he did this, went back over everything Hux had told him while he was meditating. Sometimes, he’d even seize upon fine details that Hux himself had missed.

It was all very irritating.

“Well, I’m certainly making a go at it,” Hux said. He estimated that around five or six other top brass might try to claim the rank themselves, but he had a hard time believing their power bases would be able to outmaneuver his own, even with them taking the long way home.

Kylo snorted, then shook his head. “No, you’ll be the one,” he said.

Hux could admit to himself that he’d never be brave enough to ask if Kylo Ren could actually see the future, but sometimes he allowed himself to hope so.

It would take a better man than he to deny that now was one of those times.

“Such a turnabout from me wanting you dead?” Hux said.

“Well,” Kylo Ren replied, slow and contemplative and not at all in keeping with the tone Hux had just tried to set, “If you’re not the General of the Fleets, it wouldn’t do you any good to kill me.”

His hand was still twined with Hux’s, warm and a little odd, especially when he squeezed it.

“It wouldn’t do anyone any good to kill you,” Hux snapped. “If you would just listen, you might even get that through your idiot skull.”

Kylo laughed then, that dark, hateful laugh that Hux had always liked to hear. If Snoke had been human, once, he’d long since left that behind. Hux had always been secretly glad that it wasn’t the Force that had sucked away everything about him that would have made him relatable, comprehensible.

“Here,” Kylo said, and he used his grip on Hux’s hand to spin him into the bulkhead, face first and hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs. “I’ll tell you a secret,” he whispered against Hux’s ear.

“I know all your secrets, you fool,” Hux replied, going limp in Kylo’s grip, because that was always a sure way to-- and yes. Kylo’s grip slackened, and Hux reversed their positions, slamming his head back against the bulkhead for good measure.

There was a trickle of blood from the corner of Kylo’s mouth where he’d bit his tongue, and his gaze was heavy and contemplative.

“Not this one,” Kylo said, but then he shook his head.

“What is it then?” Hux asked, taking a step back and tapping his toe with a tell he’d thought he’d erased a decade since.

Maddeningly, Kylo shook his head, a short jerk of denial that he followed up with a bright, feral grin, and part of Hux wanted to sigh, because there was paperwork to read, and reports to follow up on, and power bases to consolidate, and he absolutely didn’t have time for the sort of game he’d just realized Kylo had been winding them up for.

He didn’t though, just gave the man a onceover and scowled darkly at him.

“You’re filthy,” he said. “An embarrassment to the First Order. No one could civilize you, could they?”

“Better generals than you have tried,” Kylo said, the words dripping from his mouth, slow and sure.

A true fury licked through Hux then, and on its heels, jealousy.

I’m your general, he wanted to snarl, but he bit it back at the last second.

“Well go on then, this pitiful excuse for a cabin does happen to have its own ‘fresher, and I”m not having any of what you offer until you’ve used it.”

“If you go back to that datapad,” Kylo began, though he was already fighting with the closures on his robes, the belt having been discarded as soon as Hux began speaking.

“I will go back to that datapad, because some of us don’t get to assume new ranks through the pure chance of having been born with a magical Force half the galaxy never believed in.”

He had a thought, about the other Knights of Ren, but he quashed it immediately. The rest of them, he knew, were pitifully weak compared to Kylo Ren’s raw power, though some may have had better control.

Besides, Snoke had made clear his thoughts on his preferred successor, and the military, especially the members who’ve never had to deal directly with Kylo Ren, would back him if it came down to it.

He was borrowing trouble, and Admiral Sloane would bite his head off if she could see him now.

He went back to his paperwork, but only to sort the remaining things in his inbox into three priorities and make a promise to Mitaka that he’d address the urgent ones before the middle of the next shift.

He hoped he wasn’t lying.

Kylo came back, and Hux had half a second to worry that his new ascendancy would have changed his tastes, but he hovered at Hux’s side almost meekly, and then glanced down at him.

“You really shouldn’t use that chair; it’ll ruin your posture.”

There was a joke there, humor licking at the edges of the statement, and Hux spared a moment to look up at Kylo Ren, who gazed down at him with a galaxy of emotion held barely in check behind his eyes, before he stretched to his feet one last time and swept through the door to the private bunk.

It was as small as the one Hux had been forced to use when he’d had his first command, and he grimaced around it in dismay, noting with disgust that the ship’s captain had even left behind a few of his personal effects.

Hopefully, it was an oversight and not an insult, and either way, it was a problem for the morning.

Kylo Ren pressed into his personal space, and his lips were gentle for a second, two, on the back of Hux’s neck before the sharp sting of teeth had Hux turning and shoving Kylo, his palms flat against the other man’s chest.

Kylo never tried very hard to win these stupid games once one of them was naked, and Hux’s last coherent thought before everything was swallowed up in sweat and sex was that he very much did not want Kylo Ren dead, but he probably ought to.

***

Their fleet spilled out of hyperspace with little fanfare, the planet currently serving as the homeworld to the First Order winking in starlight beneath them like a particularly dull gray marble, and Kylo Ren watched on from his place of honor on the bridge.

General Hux stood beside him, his hands clasped behind his back in an exactly correct manner, and watched as the communications board lit up, as dignitaries and leaders called up to make certain that the new Supreme Leader knew they had acknowledged him immediately.

“Open communications on all frequencies,” Kylo said, and Hux gave him a sharp look, like that wasn’t what he was expected, maybe even required by the circumstances to do. Kylo had grown up with too many stories of the Battle of Endor to not know how to handle this, at the very least.

“This is Supreme Leader Kylo Ren,” he said, “Aboard the flagship Annihilator, accompanied by the General of the Fleets Armitage Hux and…”

Hux’s reaction to Kylo’s presumption of his promotion was only obvious to someone who knew him very well, but Kylo knew him better than anyone else, he thought.

He carried on with the speech he’d prepared in the dark of the night when Hux had thought him sleeping soundly enough to go back to brooding over his paperwork, over the uncertainty of his position and the politics of trying to keep it, and thought: I told you I had a secret.

The fact was, that while Kylo Ren was still certain that Hux wanted him as dead as anyone else in his life, that Rey had been in the right, he knew that Hux wanted the power he could attain at his side that much more.

And the fact was, Kylo was weak enough, soft enough, that he was willing to offer it.

It seemed a fair exchange, at least for the moment.


End file.
